- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
- Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 10:08:16 +1000 (AEST)
- To: WAI Markup Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
In answer to Sean's question, the guidelines tend to emphasise long term solutions, although the immediate needs are intended to be met by the "interim" recommendations. Owing to the time that is required to develop and revise successive versions of the page authoring guidelines, I think the emphasis on solutions that will become available during, for instance, the next 12-18 months would be perfectly appropriate. The next version of the guidelines would be generalised so as to take account of XML and other emerging standards. Since one of the main objects of the guidelines is to promote best practice from the standpoint of universal design, the misuse of HTML elements should be strongly discouraged. The main problem with regard to tables appears to be that braille and audio formatting technologies will be unable to distinguish between what is, and what is not, a genuine table, and this is likely to give rise to difficulties, such as an attempt to locate row and column headers. To minimise inconvenience for the user and for the software developer, the best solution is to ensure that table markup is introduced into a document only for its intended purpose, namely, as a representation of tabular data. Perhaps the best solution would be as follows: The prohibition expressed in the guidelines against using tables to produce columnar layout should be interim and recommended, with a note that this will be strictly required in the future, as soon as CSS positioning is supported by user agent software. On the other hand, those who are using screen reading technology with a graphical browser will still find such pages inaccessible, in the absence of a server-side linearisation service. Perhaps the recommendation could be: either do not use tables as a mechanism for producing columnar layout, or provide a server-side linearisation script, with a link that enables the user to activate it and receive a decolumnised version of the page. This guideline would be classified as "required". The required future strategy would be to use CSS positioning ("new" and "required").
Received on Wednesday, 6 May 1998 20:08:21 UTC